Fulco came up the corridor with the coffee tray and heard the whole thing through the open door: the ballroom, the date, the way his brother's voice goes flat when he is deciding something expensive.

He stops just inside the room. He does not put the tray down.

He has run this house for six years. He knows which stair creaks, which of the men on the door is owed money, and how long his brother can sit in a chair with a woman on his knee before the staff start writing it down.

"You want the honest version," he says, to you, over the tray. "The honest version is that I have wanted you since the winter the pipes froze, and he has known it since the spring, and neither of us has been decent about it."

Then he does put the tray down, on the table where the tablet is, and he stays. His half-brother's jaw moves once.